As a particle physicist, Yale's Sarah Demers is no stranger to the ways that large events - from galaxy mergers to the very formation of matter - relate to complex interactions and relationships of a vastly smaller scale.
Similarly, the large collaborative experiments she's part of as a researcher require many people to follow intricate processes and procedures to take a step forward in scientific understanding. It fascinates her.
"How do we execute a mission when there are so many different constituencies with different demands?" she said.
This kind of organizational curiosity led her to serve on Yale's Budget Advisory Group (BAG), a campus-wide committee that advises the provost on the university's annual operating budget.
Demers is one of 13 tenured faculty members from across the university who currently serve on the 21-member committee, alongside the provost, senior finance leaders, and other university leaders. Each spring, the group meets with all 48 of Yale's budget planning units to review their long-term spending plans and their annual budgets.
It's a considerable time commitment, but Demers says the role has given her a much deeper appreciation of the varied and essential ways all the units function to carry out the university's mission.
"It has been really fun for me to understand how the School of Art works, the Divinity School, the School of Medicine," said Demers, who chairs the physics department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "But it also helps me to understand, say, the Department of Human Resources - what is their role in terms of fulfilling the university's teaching and research mission?"
With the annual budget season beginning to ramp up in March, the advisory group's members are now preparing for their busy season. Throughout late March and April, the group will attend hour-long budget presentations by individual schools and units and ask detailed questions of the unit leaders. The committee will then deliberate and make detailed budget recommendations for the provost's consideration as he prepares a final budget proposal for the president and, in June, for approval by Yale's Board of Trustees.
"The work of the Budget Advisory Group exemplifies the best of the university - faculty collaborating with deans and other university leaders to think broadly and institutionally about how to advance our academic mission," said Scott Strobel, provost and chair of the budget group.
Stephen Murphy, Yale's vice president for finance and chief financial officer, noted that faculty serving in the group offer both time and expertise as they meet with the leaders of each school and budget planning unit and guide them in budgetary decisions that support the units' priorities. "They engage in robust discussions, provide clear and compelling feedback, and share important perspectives gained from years, or even decades, spent in their fields, labs and classrooms," he said.
Direct and regular faculty participation in budget discussions makes resource allocation a collaborative and open endeavor, said Feisal Mohamed, a professor of English and member of the budget group.
"The existence of BAG really lends a sense of transparency and shared governance to the budgeting process," said Mohamed, a scholar of 17th century literature who is in his second year as part of the group. "There's a fundamentally very healthy relationship between this committee and the provost's office. That trust is sustained by the fact that the consensus of the committee is generally followed in arriving at final budget decisions."
Faculty members are not there to advocate for their individual departments and schools, Mohamed noted, but rather to lend their expertise as university citizens.
"We all have a sense that we're part of a whole here," Mohamed said. "And we all value the whole."
To that end, one of the pleasures of serving on the committee is hearing the different perspectives of faculty from across the university, he said, noting that "it's quite cheering when you're in a meeting discussing humanities units and you hear a colleague from the medical school speak eloquently about the contribution of the humanities to the university."
Strobel called it "an honor to work alongside these colleagues," and added that "every year, when the group convenes, I'm inspired by the dedication and commitment fellow faculty and staff leaders bring to our collective work. As chief academic officer and chief budget officer, I'm incredibly grateful for their ongoing guidance, which has made financial strategies across the university more thoughtful and principled."
Serving a common mission
Melvin Chen, a professor in the practice of piano at Yale School of Music who joined the budget group in 2017, is one of its longest-serving faculty members.
Chen has served in years when the university's financial picture was particularly bright, and in leaner times like this year, as the university prepares for a major increase in the federal endowment tax. On July 1, the tax on Yale's investment income will rise from 1.4% to 8%, increasing the university's expenses by about $250 million per year. This expense will increase in the future at roughly the rate the endowment grows.
Regardless of the circumstances, Chen said, every year he approaches each budget presentation as if he were a student in a classroom, asking questions about anything he's unsure about.
"I'm learning what they're doing, what their priorities are, what they would like to do," he said. "Being on the committee is not only an education in how the university works, but also in the diversity among the units in terms of how they plan and think about budgeting."
One of his biggest revelations, he said, is how vastly different in scale the units are. For example, he said, before he joined the committee, he hadn't realized that "the medical school is such a huge part of the university - it accounts for about half the budget." (Yale School of Medicine also generates 94% of the university's $1.88 billion medical services revenue budget.)
Mohamed was equally surprised by the size differences. And yet, he said, there is a shared sense that all units are valued.
"Every unit contributes to our common academic mission," he said. "The point of budgeting is not to identify efficiencies or to make this a profit-driven enterprise, but to support the academic mission."
For economist Andrew Metrick, serving in the Budget Advisory Group has driven home just how crucial long-serving staff members are to the budget process.
"That's the biggest surprise to me - how incredibly reliant we are on deep staff expertise," said Metrick, the Janet L. Yellen Professor of Finance and Management at the Yale School of Management. "We need people who can tell us, 'We tried that.' Or, 'When we tried this, we had a problem here and here. And we had to fix it by doing this. So we would need to spend more money here.' There's no real way to know that unless you've been around that stuff a lot.
"We're a $6-billion operation," he added. "I'm glad there are these professionals who are on top of all the details and know the history of each unit."
Demers had a similar epiphany about the dedication of the various leaders in units across the university campus. But even more enlightening is what she has learned about Yale's endowment, which provides about one third of the annual operating budget.
Before Demers joined BAG, her perspective was that Yale should perhaps minimize the many restrictions on the use of endowment funds and make them more freely available. But her viewpoint has shifted.
"The endowment represents thousands of acts of generosity over hundreds of years," she said. "It's thousands of pots of money, many with a very specific purpose. We can think of those restrictions as being a real challenge, but they are also incredible gifts to the institution. It's delightful how creatively the endowment is being used to further the mission of the institution."
